Tag Archives: design

It’s typical isn’t it? I try and do something genuinely nice and the world conspires to deny my effort. There I was walking down the street when I happened upon what must be in the ranking for worst sign in the world. There is so much wrong with it that I don’t know where to start – damaged, dirty and illegible to begin with.

I felt a sign like that was doing any business more harm than good so decided to engage in a little guerilla marketing and upgrade their signage for them.

I’d designed their uncommissioned new signage and got as far as looking for a local printer when I realised they’d removed their on street display. Maybe they’re just psychic and don’t want anything to do with my garish redesign. Or perhaps they’d realised the sign’s nefarious potential as it was. Who knows? That’ll teach me anyway.

Here at id-iom HQ we’re honour-bound to respond when inspiration strikes. So when I had what I thought was a fairly simple idea to create a halftone stencil from one of my designs I was under the impression it would be plain sailing. Countless hours and multiple design dead-ends later and I am finally happy with my creation. It turns out that turning a line drawing with a little shading into halftone suitable as a one layer stencil isn’t quite as easy as I had imagined. It always wants to leave solid black areas black or have them black with small white dots. And that’s not what I was after. But I got there in the end.

Anyway, enough of my travails. This eye-popping young lady doesn’t want to be defined by lines or colours and so has decided to represent herself with a series of small black dots which, when taken together, give the exact impression she was after. Here she is hanging out in front of her favourite wallpaper made in small batches by blind monks from the submarine kingdom of Atlantis in the mid to late 60’s. I expect she’ll instagram it. Or perhaps she’s now on Vero too.

Given that we’d already done a ‘Bristol’ ambigram design before Christmas I thought it only fair to get Brixton in on the action. Knowing my current proclivities if I did a load of them they’d all have stripes on them so I limited myself to just two versions for now. One with stripes, obviously, and one with a wavy patterned design. In all fairness I’d probably have to respray the blue and grey one if anyone wanted it as my favourite part, the Ace of Aces logo bit, hasn’t really come out very well but I thought I’d wait and see if there was any interest first. They’re A2 in size and I’d also be happy to re-do with any particular background colourways as requested if anyone felt so inclined as to ask. So there you have it.

As a side note if you’re not familiar with Ram John Holder’s song ‘Brixton Blues’ then I suggest you get yourself to Youtube pretty sharpish and give your ears a little treat.

After coming up with this ambigram design (which reads the same upside down) I showed it to the other half of id-iom who was a little perplexed as to what it said. After bringing the debate to a wider audience on Facebook it would seem that I opened a tin of worms as it’s apparently not at all clear what it says and I had numerous different answers as to what it might be.

I realise I could tweak the image to make it less vague and ambiguous but I decided I quite liked the idea that it wasn’t entirely decipherable and was more like trying to decode graffiti tags so decided to run with it. To celebrate the various different answers I received I’ve come up seven different versions of the design and each one has been titled in dymo letters with one of the guesses. It’s pretty plain to me what it says but then I guess perception is in the eye of the beholder so I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

They’re on A2 paper and made using the magic of stencils and spraypaint. The ‘Ace of Aces’ bit is pretty cool if I do say so myself. Drop me a line if you’re interested (or confused).

Here at id-iom we love nothing more than a good challenge so when we were contacted by our local fire brigade and asked to do a logo for their unofficial uniform we jumped at the chance. They take pride in being firefighters in Lambeth and wanted something that reflected that so after scratching our heads for a while we managed to come up with an initial selection of designs. After these had been shown around the interested parties a clear favourite emerged:

Design using the LFB logo. Naughty id-iom.

As our design is an unofficial item we weren’t really supposed to be using the LFB logo so instead swapped that out for the call sign for the three different stations that cover the borough of Lambeth and, hey presto, we had ourselves some approved designs.

Just yesterday we were invited down to Clapham Fire Station to pick up a couple of t-shirts they’d had printed up and to have a look around. id-iom’s collective inner child (which is never difficult to reach) was, of course, pretty excited by the idea of a personal tour of a fire station and we certainly weren’t let down. We were given a brief rundown of how the station operates, were shown the fire engine, had all our inane questions were answered and I even got to try on some breathing apparatus. Win all round.

Even the cat is down with this one. And you know how choosy cats are.

What kind of self respecting man-child would turn down the chance to wear the breathing rig?

Check out this bad lad. It had some kind of articulated crane arm on it that can reach 30 m (I checked). Now how would that be for getting up hard to reach high places for a bit of painting?

As long time patrons of our local pub we were more than happy to assist when they asked us to design a flyer for a spot of local promotion. After some initial inspiration all that was needed was a little tinkering on the computer and we had a nice little image worked up.

Like the flyer says ‘Music, sports, pool table, chat and good times’ – although not necessarily in that order. At least I know where I’ll be going for a few jars tonight…

For further information about us and what we get up to you can visit our flickr, twitter (@thisisidiom) and we can also be found on Facebook.

We were asked by the lady who bought our original ‘Undercover Lover‘ canvas if we could recreate it as an urban camo window graphic for her new home. She wanted to let some light in to her living room but didn’t want net curtains, wasn’t convinced with shutters and decided frosted glass was passe. Without remembering how shoddy my Illustrator skills were I readily agreed thinking it would be a nice quick job. After doing a bit of research into one way graphics (like they sometimes have on the backs of buses – so it’s an advert from the outside but you can see out clearly) I ploughed ahead.

The design is relatively simple and the job is clearly not all that complicated to someone who knows what they are doing with Illustrator but for me turned into a nightmare of internet tutorials and working out how to convert a colour raster image into a decent vector image. Thankfully I eventually managed to get it right and the image was sent off to print. After a nervous wait (did i even get the window measurements right?) it was time to install which, surprisingly, went about as smoothly as one could hope. From the inside you can see out clearly and it lets in a surprising amount of light and from the outside you can only really see the graphic. Sweet. Job done. Finally.